Branding a Private Restaurant

Sample Logo and Menu Cover for Family Run Restaurant

For this example article, the client is an imaginary family run restaurant that offers simple homestyle cooking in a cozy and comfortable environment.

The establishment shuns pandering to fashion and concentrates on traditional favorite dishes, using the tagline ‘Just like your Mama made!’

Target Market

This restaurant enjoys a broad target market that is truly cross-generational and reasonable pricing makes its offering accessible to all.

For that reason, rather than styling themselves for the target market, they concentrate on developing their own homely and timeless image.

Font

For their logo, a script font has been selected, though with a slight twist. Script fonts can be quite timeless and that concept fits in with an establishment that eschews fashion and prefers to build its own image.

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Script fonts have a rhythm that can be quite comforting and lends them a degree of elegance. The twist, in this case, is the slightly distressed or misprinted feel that the chosen font has, which becomes more obvious on closer inspection.

The font is a free font called Porcelain Regular and it is produced and offered for download by Eduardo Recife from his website www.misprintedtype.com. The tag line on the menu cover is set in Chúcara Text, a free and excellent serif face that can be found at Juan Pablo de Gregorio’s site. Designers interested in the font should leave a comment or email Juan Pablo requesting a copy be emailed to them.

The flowing lines of the font have been echoed in a pale outlined flourish placed below the text. There are actually two flourishes which have been slightly transformed and misaligned to complement the slight irregularities of the text. Graphic designers will find free flourishes on vector graphics websites such as Vecteezy.

Color Scheme

The color palette for this design consists of a mid brown and two shades of beige which offer a calm and homely feel. They help to underline that this is not a restaurant concerned with fashion.

It also lends itself to spot color printing on a colored paper stock with just two inks and if ever necessary, dropping the pale flourish would make the design suitable for single color reproduction.

Picture

The image on the menu cover is that of a bowl of soup – it’s hard to imagine a more homely dish than a steaming broth. This further accentuates the restaurant’s ethos of simple home cooking and by using it at a small size as little more than a motif, it doesn’t appear too showy.

The photo was taken by Richard Dudley and is available for free from the stock.xchng website.

Layout

The focus of the menu cover is the logo design itself and further interest is added to the design with the incorporation of the tagline. The tagline is incorporated quite closely with the Newbys text to maintain a sense of unity, but the color of the sub-text is a paler brown to stop it unbalancing the design.

The logo unit is placed quite close to the top of the page and the image is used to balance the piece by adding interest to the space below. The addition of a surrounding border helps to unify the piece as a whole.

Conclusion

This sample piece shows one solution to a hypothetical brief and is designed to stimulate Graphic Designers into thinking about how they might approach a similar design brief.